The most reticent and troubled member of the so-called New York School of Poets, James Schuyler (1923–91) gave his first poetry reading in November 1988, at the advanced age of sixty-five. The queue for this legendary event, held at the Dia Art Foundation in Manhattan, snaked around the block. ‘Everybody on the planet was there,’ enthused his assistant Eileen Myles. His longtime friend and collaborator John Ashbery delivered the introduction, praising Schuyler for writing ‘in what Marianne Moore calls plain American which cats and dogs can read’, before adding, with a graceful hint of envy, ‘he makes sense, dammit, and manages to do so without falsifying or simplifying.’ Portly, bushy-browed, his nerves calmed by a beta blocker, Schuyler opened with his poem ‘Salute’, composed thirty-four years earlier, during the first of his many stays in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. ‘Past is past’, this poem begins, as if Schuyler were reworking the opening lines of T S Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘and if one/remembers what one meant/to do and never did, is/not to have thought to do/enough?’

An anthology might be made of the verse of mid-century American poets composed in hospitals such as the Payne Whitney. It was during his residence there in 1954 that Robert Lowell wrote the prose text that became the source of his radically innovative elegies for his parents, collected in Life Studies. Schuyler’s ‘The Payne Whitney Poems’ of two decades later brilliantly capture the opposite of brilliance – inertia, dread, blankness: ‘Some-/one is watching morning/TV. I’m not reduced to that/yet. I wish one could press/snowflakes in a book like flowers.’ Random wisps of whimsy and angst drift through this sequence, so that reading it gives one a feeling of being on the ward oneself.

Nathan Kernan’s excellent biography traces the origins of Schuyler’s recurrent bouts of mania (he was hospitalised on eleven occasions, often for many months at a time) to the conflicts of his early years. His father, Marcus, was a journalist who fought and lost a battle with a gambling addiction that resulted in separation from Schuyler’s mother, Margaret, shortly before he turned six. Divorce and the arrival of an unloved stepfather, Berton Ridenour, followed two years later. Like Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, Schuyler grew up mainly in small-town America, living first in Chevy Chase, Maryland, then in Buffalo and East Aurora in New York state. It is unclear exactly when he realised he was gay, but Kernan relates that by his mid-teens his mother had become suspicious of his tastes in literature, which included Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, Saki and Harold Nicolson. It was Logan Pearsall Smith’s account in Unforgotten Years (1938) of visiting Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey, in the 1880s that triggered Schuyler’s sudden and overwhelming recognition of his calling: ‘I looked up and the whole landscape shimmered … I wanted to be a writer and would be one.’

While Ashbery, O’Hara and another New York School confrère, Kenneth Koch, all attended Harvard, Schuyler had a distinctly unelite education, dropping out of Bethany College in West Virginia after a year and a half, which he had mainly spent playing bridge. He enrolled in the navy in 1943, but life there suited him no better; in November of that year, he failed to return from shore leave. He was missing for almost a month, probably holed up with an older lover whom he’d picked up in New York. On finally surfacing, he was remanded in a naval prison, where a psychiatrist reported that he showed ‘effeminated mannerisms and urges toward oral perverse activity’. Further, it had become apparent that his reasons for going AWOL were ‘directly related to homosexual urges and activities’. His distressed mother vigorously contested the draconian sentence of ‘undesirable discharge’, arguing in a plangent letter to the authorities that her eldest son might yet achieve ‘the qualities of true manliness’ and so deserved a second chance.

Schuyler almost at once began enjoying ‘qualities of true manliness’ very different from those his mother had in mind. By April 1944 he was living on 71st Street with Bill Aalto, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, on whom Hemingway partly based Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Their relationship, which lasted until Aalto’s periodic explosions of anger became seriously dangerous (he once chased Schuyler round a table brandishing a carving knife), involved, Kernan speculates, ‘consensual sadomasochism’. Through Aalto, Schuyler was introduced to Chester Kallman and Kallman’s partner W H Auden. Schuyler shared with Kallman a passion for opera, and the two soon adopted the camp nicknames ‘Dorabella’ and ‘Fiordiligi’, after the sisters in Così fan tutte. Kernan suggests that the character of the sailor Emble in Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety is endowed with many of Schuyler’s characteristics; Emble’s description of a battleship being torpedoed and sinking closely resembles a scene witnessed by Schuyler during his brief naval career.

An anthology might also be made of celebrations of European sights and cities by mid-century American poets, enjoying, as Lowell put it in his elegy for John Berryman, ‘our fifties’ fellowships/to Paris, Rome and Florence’. Having published almost nothing and having never graduated, Schuyler was not in line for a Fulbright scholarship, but he boldly decided to use an inheritance of around $4,000 to spend a couple of years in Italy with his tempestuous lover. They settled in Florence, moved on to Rome, and then joined Auden and Kallman on Ischia. Schuyler’s restrained and moving elegy for Auden, included in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Morning of the Poem (1980), incorporates numerous vignettes and bon mots that unerringly capture the Auden of this period:

On Ischia he claimed to take
St Restituta seriously, and
sat at Maria’s cafe in the cobbled
square saying, ‘Poets should
dress like businessmen,’ while
he wore an incredible peach-
colored nylon shirt.

Schuyler also recorded typing up the manuscript of Auden’s Nones and finding himself thinking, ‘Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself.’ During his years in Europe he was at work on short stories, and it was not until his return to New York that the shimmering landscape really came into focus. The immediate catalyst was his discovery in a magazine called Accent of a poem (‘The Three-Penny Opera’) by O’Hara, whom he’d never previously heard of.

Schuyler spent much of the 1960s as a welcome and then not so welcome guest of the painter Fairfield Porter, whose wife, Anne, once quipped, ‘Jimmy came for the weekend and stayed eleven years.’ Prising him out of their home in Southampton on Long Island was not at all easy, for Schuyler was as adept as Harold Skimpole at not taking a hint. ‘I’ll think about it,’ was how he responded when asked to leave some eight years into his stay, which lasted from 1962 to 1973.

Meanwhile, Aalto was succeeded by a decorative artist called Charles Heilemann, who was succeeded by the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, who was succeeded by the pianist Arthur Gold. I could go on. Schuyler’s love life and friendships provide the structure for much of this biography. Both filter into his poetry, which follows O’Hara’s in its use of casual references to the poet’s circle and the ups and downs of relationships, full of promise and excitement one moment, inexplicably over the next. Here is the last stanza of ‘This Dark Apartment’:

How I wish you would come
back! I could tell
you how, when I lived
on East 49th, first
with Frank and then with John,
we had a lovely view of
the UN building and the
Beekman Towers. They were
not my lovers, though.
You were. You said so. 

The ‘you’ addressed here is Bob Jordan, a married man whom Schuyler encountered in the Everard Baths in April 1971. Jordan was the object of Schuyler’s more bizarre infatuations, one which wholly baffled his sophisticated friends. Kenward Elmslie thought Jordan a ‘creep’, while Ashbery wittily observed, ‘He looked sort of like a Brooks Brothers salesman, which is what he was.’ This doomed affair initiated the most harrowing period in Schuyler’s life, though this was also the time in which he wrote some of his finest poetry, as well as his delightful comedy of suburban manners What’s for Dinner? – one of my all-time favourite novels. 

By 1978 Schuyler was living in what was effectively a flophouse amid derelicts and junkies. From this life of squalor he was saved by a trust fund set up by wealthy friends under the aegis of the Frank O’Hara Foundation. This enabled him to move into a small apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, where he was tended to by a series of assistants, starting with Eileen Myles. While there, he produced his final book, the serene and immaculately paced A Few Days (1985). Actually, pretty much all of Schuyler’s poetry is serene and immaculately paced. It offers none of the Sturm und Drang of the work of his fellow Payne Whitney poets, but rather a mood of calm and possibility, an exquisite attention to particulars, a fusion of chatty humility and camp humour. It is only slowly you realise that Schuyler’s unobtrusive lyricism has been so beautifully distilled from the quotidian that the quotidian seems, if only
momentrarily, enough.